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Losing Bargain: Why Winner-Take-All Vote Assignment Is the Electoral Collegeâ•Žs Least Defensible Feature Case Western Reserve Law Review Volume 68 Issue 2 Article 4 2017 Losing Bargain: Why Winner-Take-All Vote Assignment is the Electoral College’s Least Defensible Feature Katherine Florey Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/caselrev Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Katherine Florey, Losing Bargain: Why Winner-Take-All Vote Assignment is the Electoral College’s Least Defensible Feature, 68 Case W. Rsrv. L. Rev. 317 (2017) Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/caselrev/vol68/iss2/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Journals at Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Case Western Reserve Law Review by an authorized administrator of Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons. Case Western Reserve Law Review·Volume 68·Issue 2·2017 Losing Bargain: Why Winner- Take-All Vote Assignment is the Electoral College’s Least Defensible Feature Katherine Florey† Abstract The electoral college is usually considered as a single institution that—in contrast to a system of direct election—mediates the popular will and advances counter-majoritarian principles. To its critics, this role is a destructive one; the electoral college thwarts the foundational democratic idea that all votes should count equally and the majority’s choice should lead. By contrast, defenders of the electoral college argue that it is a deliberately crafted institution whose deviations from na- tionwide popular sentiment are part of its design. Yet the electoral college is not a single institution but rather a combination of pro- cedures. The electoral college produces results potentially different from those that would be achieved by direct election through several distinct mechanisms, including the two-vote bonus given to all states, the assignment of electoral votes based on total population rather than voters, and the award of state electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. Of these mechanisms, the use of winner-take-all rules stands out as the least defensible. In contrast to other aspects of the electoral college, winner-take-all systems were not part of the electoral college’s original design and were adopted haphazardly at the state level, without sys- tematic consideration of their national consequences. Further, winner- take-all rules cause considerable harm by contributing most strongly to the risk of popular-electoral splits, by creating incentives for fraud, voter suppression, and other undesirable campaign tactics, and by arbi- trarily privileging some voters’ preferences at others’ expense. As a result, advocates for electoral college reform should make abolition of winner-take-all central to both their critiques of the current process and their evaluation of reform proposals. † Professor of Law, University of California, Davis, School of Law. I wish to thank John Patrick Hunt, Derek T. Muller, Jae Ha, Aviva Simon, Kevin Johnson, and Madhavi Sunder for helpful contributions and support in writing this Article. 317 Case Western Reserve Law Review·Volume 68·Issue 2·2017 Losing Bargain Contents Introduction ............................................................................ 318 I. The Historical Development of Electoral College’s Counter-majoritarian Features ..................................... 326 A. The “Constant Two” Small-State Bonus .................................. 327 B. Population-Based Representation in the Electoral Vote ............ 331 C. The Evolution of Winner-Take-All .......................................... 336 II. The Distinctive Ill Effects of Winner-Take-All ........... 345 A. Winner-Take-All’s Negative Effects on the Election Process ...... 345 1. Contributing to Arbitrary Electoral-Popular Splits ............... 345 2. Incentives for Fraud and Voter Suppression .......................... 349 3. Arbitrarily Distributing Power to Certain Voter Groups ...... 352 4. Distortions of the Meaning of an Election ............................. 356 5. Third-Party Mischief and Spoiler Effects ............................... 358 B. The Experience of Winner-Take-All in Party Nominations ....... 360 1. Winner-Take-All in the Evolution of Modern Primaries ........ 360 2. Conclusions from Winner-Take-All in Party Primaries ......... 365 III. Implications for Electoral College Reform .................. 366 A. The Underemphasis of Winner-Take-All in Electoral College Critiques ............................................................................. 367 B. The Case That Winner-Take-All Is the Electoral College’s Worst Feature ............................................................................... 368 C. The Practical Consequences of a Winner-Take-All Focus ......... 378 D. Reform Proposals and Winner-Take-All .................................. 380 1. Direct Election: Proposals and Historical Experience ............ 381 2. Alternatives to Direct Election Proposals .............................. 384 3. Using the Courts to Undermine Winner-Take-All ................. 392 Conclusion ............................................................................... 395 Introduction Even as the electoral college has, for the second time in sixteen years, produced a president who did not win the popular vote,1 electoral college reform seems in some ways farther away than ever. No recent effort to change the manner in which the president is elected has pro- gressed nearly as far as the proposed Bayh-Celler constitutional amend- ment to institute a direct election system, which passed the House by a wide margin in 1969 but ultimately failed to come to a vote in the Senate.2 While the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—an 1. See infra notes 169–70 (discussing the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016). 2. See Lawrence D. Longley & Alan G. Braun, The Politics of Electoral College Reform 139–78 (1972). 318 Case Western Reserve Law Review·Volume 68·Issue 2·2017 Losing Bargain ingenious idea developed by a group of professors and legislators in the wake of the 2000 election3—has been passed by eleven states, its pro- gress has slowed with no state enacting it into law since New York did so in 2014.4 The current president of the United States, who in 2012 called the electoral college a “disaster for democracy,” has more recently hailed it as “actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play.”5 Despite dire warnings in the decades prior to the 2000 election that an electoral-popular vote split would be a “debacle” and a “disaster,”6 it seems that Americans have, in fact, learned to live with such a result as a regular occurrence. Indeed, not only have fears that an electoral-popular split would provoke a consti- tutional crisis failed to materialize, but the country’s apparent ac- quiescence may even have decreased momentum for a change in the process.7 Despite this discouraging backdrop, this Article argues that it is time to take up the discussion again from a new angle. The electoral college is usually considered as a single institution that—in contrast to a system of direct election—mediates the popular will and advances values other than those that would be served by pure direct democracy. To its critics, this role is a destructive one; the electoral college thwarts the foundational democratic principle that all votes should count equal- 3. John R. Koza et al., Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote 281–83 (4th ed. 2013). 4. See Status of National Popular Vote Bill in Each State, Nat’l Popular Vote, http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state-status [https://perma. cc/BR6D-6T76] (last visited Sept. 26, 2017). New York originally signed onto the compact for a limited time, but made its approval permanent in 2016. See New York, Nat’l Popular Vote, http://www.national popularvote.com/state/ny [https://perma.cc/76RM-KA3D] (last visited Sept. 26, 2017). 5. Glenn Kessler, Trump’s Flip-Flop on the Electoral College: From ‘Disaster’ to ‘Genius’, Wash. Post (Nov. 15, 2016), https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/factchecker/wp/2016/11/15/trumps-flip-flop-on-the-electoral-colle ge-from-disaster-to-genius/?utm_term=.fb2040100ad9 [https://perma.cc/J7Z D-RQNT]. 6. David W. Abbott & James P. Levine, Wrong Winner: The Coming Debacle in the Electoral College 1 (1991). 7. Ann Althouse, for example, suggests that the failure of the widely predicted outrage to materialize following the 2000 presidential election’s electoral- popular split reflects the belief that “[t]he numbers that show[] up in the popular vote tally [are] . arbitrary to some unknown degree” and winning the popular vote thus has less “moral sway” than earlier commentators had expected. Ann Althouse, Electoral College Reform: Déjà Vu, 95 Nw. U.L. Rev. 993, 1012 (2001) (book review). 319 Case Western Reserve Law Review·Volume 68·Issue 2·2017 Losing Bargain ly and the majority’s choice should lead.8 By contrast, the defenders of the electoral college argue that it is a deliberately crafted institution whose deviations from nationwide popular sentiment are part of its design.9 Yet the electoral college is not a single institution but rather a combination of procedures. The electoral college produces results potentially different from those that would be achieved by direct election through several distinct mechanisms,10 three of which are cur- rently significant and relevant.11 First and most obviously, the electoral
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